911, What's Your Emergency? Facebook Is Down!

UPDATED at 7:35 p.m. ET: Capt. Britta Steinbrenner of the LA County Sheriff's Information Bureau disputed Brink’s account and said her office was unaware of any such 911 Facebook calls. She said she had not been in contact with Brink and that he was not on duty at the time he tweeted about the calls related to the Facebook outage. She said the department is investigating and it was not immediately clear if Sgt. Brink violated department policy.

Original story: Facebook suffered a brief outage on Friday, and that was enough to send a few users into a full-fledged panic. The widespread outage lasted just “a short time,” Facebook said, and full service was quickly restored. Apparently, the inability to check out friends' latest cat pictures or the ex's new relationship status during those exasperating minutes constituted an emergency, as these tweets from Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department attest:

#Facebook is not a Law Enforcement issue, please don't call us about it being down, we don't know when FB will be back up!